‘He’s Ours. Patrick Mahomes Is Ours.’

Fans of the Kansas City Chiefs, accustomed to football disappointment, now have the most exciting player in the N.F.L. on their team, in their town.

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Zac Parsons of Kansas City, Mo., displayed his Patrick Mahomes jersey while tailgating at Arrowhead Stadium before the game against Jacksonville last Sunday.CreditCreditChristopher Smith for The New York Times

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Rob Gaskins jumped atop a massage table Wednesday night, hiked up the leg of his shorts and presented his right thigh to his favorite tattoo artist, Jeremy Taylor. It needed to be cleaned, then shaved, so Taylor could begin illustrating this city’s most beloved visage: Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

These are strange days in the Kansas City area, where locals accustomed to coveting other teams’ quarterbacks are savoring a sensation rarer than a vegetarian at Gates Bar-B-Q. After decades of playoff failures, of enduring quarterbacks like Tyler Thigpen and Tyler Palko and Brodie Croyle, the most exciting player in the N.F.L. now shines at the sport’s most critical position, for their team, in their town.

“Unless you have LeBron in your city, this is the best thing you can have,” said Carrington Harrison, 30, a sports-talk radio host here and a Kansas City native. “The Chiefs have the coolest thing you can have in sports. That person lives in Kansas City now. The It Person lives in Kansas City.”

Heading into Sunday night’s game at New England, the Chiefs are 5-0, as they were last year, as they have been before, and yet the general sense here is that this season just feels … different. That’s the word evoked most often, aside from didyoujustseethat.

To the fans here, Mahomes embodies a New Year’s resolution: a 23-year-old dude with a nasally Texas twang (called “froggish” by his coach) who can throw a football exceedingly far and exceedingly well and into exceedingly tight spaces, and whose exploits so far in his first year as a starter — 16 total touchdowns, two turnovers — offer them a chance to unburden themselves of the past.

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The tattoo artist Jeremy Taylor gave Rob Gaskins a tattoo of Mahomes this week.CreditBen Shpigel/The New York Times

And compel a grown man to request Mahomes’s curly mop be pierced into his skin for all eternity.

“We got him first,” said Gaskins, who lives in Belton, Mo. “He started here. In Kansas City. He didn’t start in Green Bay, he didn’t start in San Francisco, he didn’t start in New York. My home, Kansas City.”

Harrison, the radio host, likened the enthusiasm to LeBron James’s sitting courtside to watch Stephen Curry play at Davidson and to Jeremy Lin’s unpredictable rise with the Knicks in 2012. The mania has spread west, to the set of the television comedy “Modern Family,” where members of the crew tell Eric Stonestreet, who plays Cam, that they’ve started watching Chiefs games just because of Mahomes.

“I can’t tell you how many times I watched John Elway march down the field and beat the Chiefs,” Stonestreet, a native of Kansas City, Kan., said in a telephone interview (the answer is eight, according to Pro Football Reference). “Now I feel like we have the guy who can do it to other teams after having it done to us so many times.”

Instead of engaging in their traditional pastime of lamenting all the quarterbacks they could have drafted but didn’t — Dan Marino and Jim Kelly, for instance — Chiefs fans now marvel at the one they did. They watch loops of his highlights, post fawning memes, allow themselves to submit to his promise.

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Bob Green's basement mural of his favorite Kansas City sports stars now includes Mahomes (15), with the likes of George Brett, left, and Joe Montana (19). CreditChristopher Smith for The New York Times

The morning after Kansas City toppled Denver, Ashley Homan, a fifth-grade teacher in Smithville, Mo., told her students that they were now entering the Chiefs Kingdom — loud enough for the teacher across the hall, a Broncos fan, to hear. Cheryl Jensen, a regular tailgater in Lot D17 at Arrowhead Stadium, watched Drew Brees set the career passing yardage record Monday night and then told friends on Facebook that she couldn’t wait for Mahomes to surpass him.

“Even if they go 5-11 the rest of the way and we’re Detroit for the next 10 years, I still got to watch this guy,” said Clint Ashlock, 38, the artistic director for the Kansas City Jazz Orchestra. “I’ve never wanted to go out and buy a jersey for anybody, but I did. I might get two.”

Far more than two jerseys adorn the walls of the basement of Bob Green’s home here. It doubles as a Chiefs museum, containing everything from autographed receivers’ gloves he won beating them in pool at their former training camp in River Falls, Wis., to a red-and-white painted brick of the Hall of Fame quarterback Len Dawson.

The showpiece, though, is a mural of Green’s favorite Royals and Chiefs, a crowd including Joe Montana, Tony Gonzalez and, as of Monday, Mahomes. It took Green’s friend Chris Fleck about 70 hours to finish the mural, 12 devoted to Mahomes.

“When I’m in the grocery store and the department store and the bank, all anybody asks is, ‘Did you see what he did last night?’” Green said. “You don’t even have to ask who ‘he’ is.”

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Patti DiPardo Livergood is the former bandleader for the Kansas City Chiefs.CreditChristopher Smith for The New York Times

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“Patrick Mahomes is ours. It’s like falling in love for the first time,” DiPardo Livergood said.CreditChristopher Smith for The New York Times

Green, who was born in Iowa, moved to St. Joseph, Mo., where the Chiefs currently hold training camp, in 1963, when the franchise relocated here from Dallas. Kansas City won Super Bowl IV in 1970, then made the playoffs only twice in the next 20 years, losing both games.

Buffalo and Cleveland might have documentaries made about their football despair, but Kansas City’s postseason ledger is devastating. One victory since the 1994 season. Six consecutive playoff defeats at Arrowhead.

When asking Chiefs fans about that brutal loss to the Colts, you have to specify which one. There’s 1996, when Lin Elliott missed a last-minute attempt at a tying field goal. Or the No Punt Game of 2004, when the Chiefs, seeded second in the A.F.C., never stopped Peyton Manning. How about 2014, when they blew a 28-point lead in the third quarter?

“It’s traumatizing,” Homan said. “I mean, it makes you want to scream and cry every single time.”

Compounding the misery was the Chiefs’ insistence on procuring potential starting quarterbacks through trades or free agency, not the draft: Steve DeBerg to Montana, Rich Gannon to Elvis Grbac, Trent Green to Alex Smith, who tutored Mahomes last season after the Chiefs traded up to take him 10th over all out of Texas Tech.

Before Mahomes, the last quarterback drafted by the Chiefs to win a game for them was Todd Blackledge, in 1987. Had Croyle, a third-round pick in 2006, won any of his 10 starts from 2007 to 2010, it could have been him.

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Eric Daraban of Kansas City, Mo., grilled in the Arrowhead Stadium parking lot before last Sunday's game against Jacksonville.CreditChristopher Smith for The New York Times

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Fans streamed into Arrowhead Stadium for a Chiefs game.CreditChristopher Smith for The New York Times

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Rob Thorne of Wichita, Kan., held his beer with charcoal-stained hands before the game against Jacksonville.CreditChristopher Smith for The New York Times

To Patti DiPardo Livergood, Blackledge was the neighbor who kept letting his Rottweiler poop in her yard. To many others, he represented what could have been; he was the second quarterback taken in the fertile 1983 draft, ahead of Marino, Kelly and Ken O’Brien. She views Mahomes as a singular star for this generation.

“It’s an emotion we’ve never been able to tap into,” said DiPardo Livergood, who, like her late father, Tony, served as the Chiefs’ band director. “Not since Lenny Dawson has it really been our own. They brought in Montana, but that’s nothing like right now. He’s ours. Patrick Mahomes is ours. It’s like falling in love for the first time.”

After that Steelers win in Week 2, a man who bought a Mahomes shirt told an assistant manager, Mary Newman, that they better order more. In only the first six weeks of this season, Raygun's sales in Chiefs apparel have tripled from all of last season, and a shirt that reads, "Patrick Is Mahomey," is the company's best-selling one.

“I think our city thinks the more we embrace him, the stronger he’ll be going forward,” said Anthony Oropeza, 49, a graphic artist and web designer from Roeland Park, Kan.

Wearing a Royals hat in his basement studio, where a painting of Mahomes awaited completion, Oropeza said he perceived Mahomes as already being more popular than the catalysts on the Royals team that energized the city by barging into consecutive World Series, losing in 2014 before winning in 2015. Mahomes bridges these eras, the decline of the Royals and the ascent of the Chiefs, a singular star who, in a football context, does what Bo Jackson did when he was scaling outfield walls and clubbing 500-foot homers here 30 years ago.

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City Councilman Quinton Lucas has been a Chiefs fan since he was a kid.CreditChristopher Smith for The New York Times

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Lucas took meticulous notes of the ups and downs of Kansas City sports teams.CreditChristopher Smith for The New York Times

“It’s highlights that, if you miss them, you’re kind of going, ‘Where was I?’” the ESPN analyst Louis Riddick said of Mahomes in a telephone interview. “That’s why you better watch the whole game.”

Or as Ashlock said of Mahomes, “He’s not the equivalent of Angel Berroa.”

“It’s hard to keep denying what you see and what you feel,” said Harrison, the radio host.

Lucas said, “Whatever he regresses to is easily the best quarterback of my lifetime.”

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The artist Anthony Oropeza draws inspiration from Kansas City professional athletes. His newest work features Mahomes. CreditChristopher Smith for The New York Times

Lucas is 34, same as Gaskins, who clenched his fist and bit his lip as Taylor completed his Mahomes tattoo.

“When you see it, bro,” Taylor told him, “you won’t care.”

Finally, at 10:12 p.m., after 3 hours 37 minutes (with a few short breaks sprinkled in), Taylor told Gaskins to sit up. He glanced at the photo of Mahomes that had guided Taylor, then back at his tattoo, then back to the photo.

Taking small steps, he tottered toward Taylor, who was sitting on a stool, and kissed him on the head. It was sincere thanks for a tattoo, whether Gaskins knew it or not, that he had been waiting three decades to get.

Ben Shpigel is a sports reporter and has covered the N.F.L. and the New York Jets since 2011. He has also covered the New York Yankees and, before that, the Mets. He previously worked for The Dallas Morning News. @benshpigel

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SP1 of the New York edition with the headline: Kansas City Finally Finds a Reason to Fall in Love. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe